Planet Computers has brought to market a new line of mini Linux desktop computers. The XR Series is powered by ARM multicore processors and run Ubuntu Linux 20.04
According to Janko Mrsic-Flogel, CEO of Planet Computers, “By productizing Linux into a mini desktop PC, the XR is another step toward creating a more open and inclusive computing ecosystem.”
The XR series will be launching with two different units: XR1 (four-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 32 GB of internal storage) and XR2 (eight-core CPU, a Mali-G610 GPU, from 4GB to 32 GB of RAM, and from 32 GB to 256 GB of internal storage).
The PineTab2 is a Linux-friendly tablet with a 10.1 inch display, a detachable keyboard, and a Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor.
First unveiled in December, the new tablet has a faster processor, more memory, sturdier build quality and other improvements over the original PineTab. But one thing the new tablet has in common with its predecessor? It’s cheap. The PineTab2 will sell for $159 and up when it goes on sale soon.
In the February 2023 survey we received responses from 1,127,630,293 sites across 270,727,775 unique domains, and 12,142,793 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 4,638,508 sites, 240,148 domains and 13,907 computers.
OpenResty had the largest percentage growth in sites this month: it is now used by 95,176,082 sites, an increase of 2,884,258 (+3.13%) since last month. This brings its share of sites to 8.44%, up from 8.15% (+0.29pp). OpenResty's market share by domain count remained stable, with a slight 0.01pp increase this month - its small loss of 14,039 domains was counteracted by the greater loss of domains across all vendors this month.
We decided we wanted to try putting together a podcast and talk about all things FOSS: from lightweight news down to more deep dives and interviews and discussions with peeps who know more. With our takes and personal views applied of course.
The necessary requirements for life are physical conditions which can sustain life, nutrients and energy source, and water. This article relates to the last two requirements. Linux software can play a key part in helping to improve our health and quality of life. If you want to stay fit, part of the solution is to ensure that you are eating the right types of food in the right quantity. Nutrition analysis is important to ensure that you have a healthy balanced diet containing a variety of foods including fruit, vegetables and lots of starchy foods.
This article is not just limited to software that ensures you maintain a healthy diet. We also feature the best free Linux software for helping people to cook delicious food. Although this software will not help you turn into Gordon Ramsay, Hélène Darroze, or Bobby Flay, it will open new doors in the world of cooking. Rest assured, we have not forgotten beer lovers, as we also identify the finest beer software available.
NodeJS is pretty popular when it comes to building server-side applications with JavaScript. But, if you don't need it anymore on your Ubuntu 22.04 system, you might want to uninstall it.
There are various reasons to stream live video transmissions from webcams. The Raspberry Pi platform is perfect for such applications. It requires little power for continuous applications such as live-streaming servers. Communication with a Raspicam camera module, USB cam, or other network video signals is possible. The system is an RTMP, HLS, and SRT server. This article shows how to set up the Raspberry Pi as a streaming server to use HLS streaming. You need a video source to use it as a streaming server.
Even without a Raspberry Pi, you can do the steps described here. In addition, there are further installation instructions for Windows, Linux, and macOS available.
Setup
The application is datarhei Restreamer, a graphical user interface for the datarhei Core. The datarhei Core runs the well-known media framework FFmpeg under the hood. The easiest way to start with datarhei Restreamer is to install the official Docker container. The download and installation of the program via Docker Hub are automatic with the
pullcommand. Restreamer starts immediately after the installation. If you don't have a Raspberry Pi, use one of the other Docker containers on the datarhei Restreamer GitHub page (e.g., AMD64 or GPU Cuda support).datarhei Restreamer and datarhei Core are both open source software under the Apache License 2.0.
As a web developer, understanding PHP session timeout is essential to building secure and reliable web applications. A PHP session is a way to store user information across multiple pages, and session timeout refers to the duration for which a session remains active before expiring.
In Bash, you can easily calculate the difference between two dates. This can be useful in various scenarios, such as calculating the number of days between two events or determining the age of a person. In this article, we'll discuss different methods to calculate the difference between two dates in Bash.
With my recent experience with Deno Deploy fresh in my mind I considered using it. However I opted for a decidedly late 90s solution: XSLT. According to Wikipedia “XSLT is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents”. The ‘originally’ refers to fact that you can now generate any text with it, not just XML. Since it was created in the era of “XML ALL THE THINGS”, XSL templates are themselves XML documents. It also makes extensive use of XPath expressions to select nodes and extract their content.
Why do we need a VPN server? A VPN (Virtual Private Network) server is a network server that allows users to create a secure and encrypted connection to another network over the internet. Here are some reasons why we need a VPN server: [...]
It is not a typo. I'm actually talking about the chage command here!
Our rules and our affordances and our objectives lead us to do things whether or not those things are what we want to do or not. So having rules to do fun things or reward can be a good thing in a game.
The absolutely charming building-puzzle adventure game LEGO Bricktales is getting a free content update ready for Easter. Quite a lovely game overall, and great for a younger audience too€ — why should adults get all the fun?
It appears that Apex Legends from Respawn and EA has started banning some players on Linux, and while the Steam Deck uses Linux too it seems nearly all the bans were desktop Linux players.
Valve's popular Linux-powered gaming handheld, the Steam Deck, has officially crossed over the 8,000 mark for games noted to be Playable or Verified.
Humble Bundle has put up a new bundle of games to support relief efforts for Türkiye and Syria, after they were recently devastated by earthquakes. 100% of the proceeds will go to charity, with Humble taking no cut (and as a Humble Partner I take no cut either just to be clear).
Today is the big day! Godot Engine 4.0 is officially out now, and there's also work happening for developers to port their games to consoles now too.
We have had many requests to make Plasma 5.27.2 available in our backports PPA for Kubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu).
As usual with our PPAs, there is the caveat that the PPA may receive additional updates and new releases of KDE Plasma, Gear (Apps), and Frameworks, plus other apps and required libraries. Users should always review proposed updates to decide whether they wish to receive them.
Since I am planning to go on vacations very soonish (actually, just idling the time until I head for the airport…), I think it is good time to wrap-up the recent changes in the KDE Yocto area.
As you might have noticed, 4 weeks ago there finally was an in-person FOSDEM again. It was great event, many interesting people were there and I had really good chats. One of the main topics for me was discussing the next steps for our Yocto efforts, in particular as Volker and Hannah were also around.
That little dog at the beach idea was interesting, but too cluttered; couldn't get it to scale down very well to a 48x48 pixel image. Then yesterday I remembered a logo that was created for Wary Puppy, one of our ancient puppies. That pup was cross-compiled from source using T2. Wary is long gone -- had to strain my brain to recall -- yes, it was released in 2010, with updates until early 2013. I was still leading the Puppy project back then. There was also Racy Puppy, and sometime in 2013 I retired from the leadership roll. Distrowatch Puppy release announcements have jogged my memory.
I think it was 'afgs' who designed that logo for Wary. I searched the old forum, couldn't find it, but I do have a couple of png images...
This time it will be about setting up Home Audio Studio on a FreeBSD 13.1 system.
A recent update of SUSE’s Open Source Policy is giving developers, communities and projects food for thought as Artificial Intelligence chatbots and protocols are gaining popularity and are being integrated into the fabric of global society.
The policy is specific to all SUSE employees; the ambition, however, is that open-source communities and developers give the policy careful consideration and that the policy will inspire other companies to adopt or introduce an open-source policy.
At an online media event staged by Germany-based software vendor Software AG earlier this month, former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst was very much the booster for open-source, as well as the open management style inspired by open-source principles that he instituted during his time as Red Hat’s CEO.
That doesn’t mean that all open source advocates are going to be in total agreement with, or even like, his views on the subject. He is, after all, a businessman, an investor, and an advisor, so his views are much more aligned with those of profit-driven enterprises, where the open source development model is a means to an end, than folks who are steeped in the free software philosophy, and who tend to view open-source and free software as the whole enchilada rather than a piece of the puzzle.
Got crosvm building in Debian. Now to rebase and try to upload. Or maybe upload the version I have first and then rebase.
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version
237. This version includes the following changes:* autopkgtest: only install appt and dexdump on architectures where they are available. (Closes: #1031297) * compartors/pdf: + Drop backward compatibility assignment. + Fix flake warnings, potentially reinstating PyPDF 1.x support (untested).You find out more by visiting the project homepage.
In the latest Monthly News post, Linux Mint's Clement Lefebvre detailed some upcoming changes and improvements to the popular Linux distribution.
“It’s a story you may think you know, but you don’t.”
A while back I wrote that from an outside perspective, Ubuntu is Canonical's thing, in that Canonical runs the show despite having outside contributors. But in the wake of wrestling with Canonical's advertisements in a stock 22.04 LTS machine and losing, I want to amend that observation with an important additional one. Ubuntu is not merely Canonical's, Ubuntu is a Canonical product. Which is to say, Ubuntu exists to make money for Canonical. Further, the current evidence suggests that Canonical feels it's not making enough money for them; hence the steadily increasing advertisements in Ubuntu, along with other moves.
Ifound this GHLBD calculator on a platform selling second-hand electronic products. Three labels of this product appeal to me: “Calculator”, “Android 9.0” and “Allwinner A50“. If you only look at the appearance, this calculator is not much different from that of ordinary calculators, but the Android operating system is running on it and the screen tells me that it is definitely not an ordinary calculator.
When I bought it, I only spent 69 RMB ($10 US). I didn’t really have a use case for it, but curiosity drove me to buy one. I decided to introduce it and disassemble it to check out the hardware design.
The Intel 8086 processor (1978) has a complicated instruction set with instructions ranging from one to six bytes long. This raises the question of how the processor knows the length of an instruction.1 The answer is that the 8086 uses an interesting combination of lookup ROMs and microcode to determine how many bytes to use for an instruction. In brief, the ROMs perform enough decoding to figure out if it needs one byte or two. After that, the microcode simply consumes instruction bytes as it needs them. Thus, nothing in the chip explicitly "knows" the length of an instruction. This blog post describes this process in more detail.
Let me start by apologizing to everyone for skipping yet another monthly community update. This has largely been my fault as I was rather busy in January and following FOSDEM at the start of February I found myself occupied with things related to the EU store. I hope for things to go back to normal now; you can expect future community updates at the end of each month as per usual. Again, I apologise, mea culpa.
I hope that this month’s update and the news it brings will more than make up for the wait: the Nestflash section ins absolutely packed this month, we’re revealing PineTab2’s pricing and SKU variants (both of which I’m sure you’ll be pleased with), announcing that Star64 will be available in the next 6 weeks (or so) and report on all the work that has gone into PinePhone (Pros) development in the recent two months … and much more
Developing firmware for RP2040 is undeniably fun, what’s with all these PIOs. However, sometimes you will want to switch it around and reverse-engineer some RP2040 firmware instead. If you’ve ever tried using Ghidra for that, your experience might have been seriously lackluster due to the decompiled output not making sense when it comes to addresses – thankfully, [Wejn] has now released patches for Ghidra’s companion, SVD-Loader, that turn it all around, and there’s a blog post to go with these.
Two of Canada's biggest telecom providers are raising the fees they charge customers when they use their devices outside of Canada.
I can't believe it's already my fifth Moziversary. It's been 5 years now since I joined Mozilla as a Telemetry engineer, I blogged every year since then: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. As I'm writing this I'm actually off on vacation (and will be for another week or so) and also it's super early here. Nonetheless it's time to look back and forward.
So what have I been up to in the past year? My team changed again. We onboarded Perry and Bruno and when Mike left we got Alessio as the manager of us all. In September we finally met again at the Mozilla All Hands in Hawaii. Not everyone was there, but it was great to meet those that were.
If you’ve ever tried to figure out what performance tests you should run to target some component, and got lost in the nomenclature of our CI task names, then you’re not alone!
The current naming for performance tests that you’ll find when you run
./mach try fuzzycan look like this:test-android-hw-a51-11-0-aarch64-shippable-qr/opt-browsertime-tp6m-essential-geckoview-microsoft-support. The main reason why these task names are so convoluted is because we run so many different variant combinations of the same test across multiple platforms, and browsers. For those of us who are familiar with it, it’s not too complex. But for people who don’t see these daily, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out what tests they should be running, or even where to start in terms of asking questions. This leads to hesitancy in terms of taking the initiative to do performance testing themselves. In other words, our existing system is not fun, or intuitive to use which prevents people from taking performance into consideration in their day-to-day work.€
Development
€
In May of 2022, the Performance team had a work week in Toronto, and we brainstormed how we could fix this issue. The original idea was to essentially to build a web-page, and/or improve the
try chooserusage (you can find the bug for all of this./mach try perfwork here). However, given that developers were already used to themach try fuzzyinterface, it made little sense for us to build something new for developers to have to learn. So we decided to re-use thefzfinterface from./mach try fuzzy. I worked with Andrew Halberstadt [:ahal] to build an “alpha” set of changes first which had revealed two issues: (i) runninghgthrough the Python subprocess module results in some interesting behaviours, and (ii) our perf selector changes had too much of an impact on the existing./mach try fuzzycode. From there, I refactored the code for ourfzfusage to make it easier to use in our perf selector, and so that we don’t impact existing tooling with our changes.The
hgissue we had was quite interesting. One feature of./mach try perfis that it performs two pushes by default, one for your changes, and another for the base/parent of your patch without changes. We do this because comparisons with mozilla-central can sometimes result in people comparing apples to oranges due to minor differences in branch-specific setups. This double-push lets us produce a direct Perfherder (or PerfCompare) link in the console after running./mach try perfto easily, and quickly know if a patch had any impact on the tests.
 LibreOffice 7.5 arrived in early February 2023 as a major release to the popular open-source office suite bringing lots of new features and enhancements. But there’s always room for improvement, so LibreOffice 7.5.1 is here to introduce a new manual light/dark mode switch.
This new switch is implemented under Tools > Options > View as a drop-down box that lets you easily and quickly switch LibreOffice’s interface to use either the Light or Dark theme. LibreOffice 7.5 introduces a new Dark Mode that’s automatically enabled to match your system settings.
On February 15, the European Commission (EC) turned against Latvia in the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) for failing to incorporate the EU Open Data Directive into national law, according to an EC statement.
I don’t use the word understand lightly, it’s the most important word in this essay. But what does it actually mean for software to understand something? Here’s how I think about the progression from data to understanding, and this is the definition I’m using to back my claim that large GPT models actually understand.
I'm a programming child of the agile software movement. Just as I was starting out, Kent Beck published Extreme Programming Explained in 2000. It was a revelation. I had just enough exposure to Big Upfront Design and waterfall methodologies to appreciate what a monumental shift this was. Beck's methodology x-rayed the ills of the traditional approach, and made the terminal diagnosis crystal clear.
In this post we’re going to go deeper, with a static analysis that actually looks at the application’s code. When I started thinking about combinations of analyses for performance optimisation, I didn’t find much in the way of off-the-shelf static analyses that I could just use. So, I decided to build my own. We’re going to try and answer the question: can we use static analysis to find C/C++ code patterns that lead to sub-optimal machine code being emitted by the compiler?
I’ll first describe a particular code pattern that can lead to the compiler emitting unnecessary memory reads, and failing to auto-vectorise loops. When these patterns exist they can lead to functions being 10-20x or more slower than they otherwise could be. I’ll show how we can build CodeQL queries to find the patterns, and how we can modify the code to allow the compiler to auto-vectorise. I’ll then discuss results of applying the queries to a few code bases, lay out some issues that arise, and detail some potential future work and open questions.
There are many models for knowledge acquisition: your lamdas, oodas, etc. I like the Shewhart cycle22 Also known under many other names, e.g. the Deming cycle, pdsa, or pdca, depending on who you ask., so that’s the one I’ll talk about here. But it doesn’t matter which one you prefer; most of these models are basically the same thing33 Except for ooda which is weird in a way I don’t understand and nobody has been able to adequaty explain to me. But then again, I have only myself to blame for not yet reading Boyd. Maybe it would be obvious if I did!: a way to operationalise the scientific method.
Android running Freedreno
As part of my training at Igalia I’ve been attempting to write a new backend for Freedreno that targets the proprietary “KGSL” kernel mode driver. For those unaware there are two “main” kernel mode drivers on Qualcomm SOCs for the GPU, there is the “MSM”, and “KGSL”. “MSM” is DRM compliant, and Freedreno already able to run on this driver. “KGSL” is the proprietary KMD that Qualcomm’s proprietary userspace driver targets. Now why would you want to run freedreno against KGSL, when MSM exists? Well there are a few ones, first MSM only really works on an up-streamed kernel, so if you have to run a down-streamed kernel you can continue using the version of KGSL that the manufacturer shipped with your device. Second this allows you to run both the proprietary adreno driver and the open source freedreno driver on the same device just by swapping libraries, which can be very nice for quickly testing something against both drivers.
When “DRM” isn’t just “DRM”
When working on a new backend, one of the critical things to do is to make use of as much “common code” as possible. This has a number of benefits, least of all reducing the amount of code you have to write. It also allows reduces the number of bugs that will likely exist as you are relying on well tested code, and it ensures that the backend is mostly likely going to continue to work with new driver updates.
When I started the work for a new backend I looked inside mesa’s
src/freedreno/drmfolder. This has the current backend code for Freedreno, and its already modularized to support multiple backends. It currently has support for the above mentioned MSM kernel mode driver as well as virtio (a backend that allows Freedreno to be used from within in a virtualized environment). From the name of this path, you would think that the code in this module would only work with kernel mode drivers that implement DRM, but actually there is only a handful of places in this module where DRM support is assumed. This made it a good starting point to introduce the KGSL backend and piggy back off the common code.For example the
drmmodule has a lot of code to deal with the management of synchronization primitives, buffer objects, and command submit lists. All managed at a abstraction above “DRM” and to re-implement this code would be a bad idea.How to get Android to behave
Finally, for this release, Python 3.11 is now supported!
Again this won’t mean much to most of you as this only affects Home Assistant core users and hasn’t yet been added to Home Assistant OS or Container yet, but after speaking to the devs, this support for core will firstly allow them to start getting some feedback before making changes to OS and container as Python 3.11 is quite a big change so they want to make sure it’s fully stable first.
In the last blog post, I pointed out that I didn’t know exactly what it would be my next steps for the near future. Gladly, I had the amazing opportunity to start a new Igalia Coding Experience with a new project.
This time Melissa Wen pitched me with the idea to play around with Rust for Linux in order to rewrite the VGEM driver in Rust. The Rust for Linux project is growing fast with new bindings and abstractions being introduced in the downstream RfL kernel. Also, some basic functionalities were introduced in Linux 6.1. Therefore, it seems like a great timing to start exploring Rust in the DRM subsystem!
Again highlighting its tenacity, its resilience and its way with words, Ukraine marked last week's grim anniversary of Russia's invasion with a new postage stamp featuring an image from street artist Banksy's recent visit there: A small boy deftly flipping to the ground a man in a judo match, with in one lower corner the words, in Cyrillic, "FCK PTN." The "allegorical" image, says the post office, describes, "A year of resistance - painful, ragged, fierce, persistent," but above all "Ukrainian."
Russian President Vladimir Putin inaugurated the brand-new Big Circle Line of the Moscow subway on Wednesday, participating in the opening ceremony remotely.
Some repairs happen as if by pure luck, and [Sebastian] shows us one such repair on Hackaday.io. He found two Fluke 175 meters being sold on eBay, with one having a mere beeper issue, and another having a “strange error”. Now, theoretically, swapping beepers around would give you one working meter and a kit of spare parts – but this is Fluke we’re talking about, and [Sebastian] wasn’t satisfied leaving it there.
Do you, as I do, find yourself looking around to the realization that things are getting a little weird around here? Do you feel that things have gotten out of hand and out of control? Do you feel like maybe we are sitting in a bit of hot water? I sure do and to the point where I often, more and more it seems, just want to throw up my hands and surrender.
To surrender would certainly be one response to these times and an understandable response at that but let’s do keep it in mind that surrender, though it may appeal to a certain part of our personality, comes with its own set of consequences. One possibility might be that all those things that make us uncomfortable will just right themselves like a spinning top that eventually resolves its wiggle and finds balance or another possibility is that the water, getting hotter and hotter, begins to boil and the frog, poor frog, is boiled to death.
The amplitude of the gradient of a potential inside a wire cage is investigated, with particular attention to the 2D configuration of a ring of n disks of radius r held at equal potential. The Faraday shielding effect depends upon the wires having finite radius and is weaker than one might expect, scaling as | log r|/n in an appropriate regime of small r and large n. Both numerical results and a mathematical theorem are provided. By the method of multiple scales, a continuum approximation is then derived in the form of a homogenized boundary condition for the Laplace equation along a curve. The homogenized equation reveals that in a Faraday cage, charge moves so as to somewhat cancel an external field, but not enough for the cancellation to be fully effective. Physically, the effect is one of electrostatic induction in a surface of limited capacitance. An alternative discrete model of the effect is also derived based on a principle of energy minimization. Extensions to electromagnetic waves and 3D geometries are mentioned.
Students and researchers who have come to Latvia from Ukraine following the war launched by Russia will continue to receive support – a grant for studies€ or€ for the pursuit of scientific or academic work, with a total of up to €688,000 this year, according to the€ Ministry of Education and Science (IZM) rules approved by€ the government on Tuesday, February 28.
So I scheduled fifty one-hour conversations with fifty interesting people over seven days. Back-to-back meetings from 9am to 10pm every day. It was one of the most intense and fascinating (and heart-warming and educational) things I’ve ever done in my life. I recorded almost every conversation into a little voice recorder, then had it transcribed. When I got home to New Zealand I spent 30 hours reading through the transcriptions to help me remember what we talked about, then made a tiny summary, below.
For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That’s an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. “Cheating is rampant,” a Princeton senior told me. “Since Covid there’s been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity.”
Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.
There are early signs that firms which specialise in selling assignments are already having to shift their business models in the face of more students using the likes of ChatGPT to generate answers of a similar or better quality to what they may have been tempted to buy previously.
We wrote a fast URL parser in C++. It does not do anything beyond portable C++: no assembly language, no explicit SIMD instructions, etc.
Can the ARM processors parse URLs faster?
There were some that doubted the day would ever come, but we’re happy to report that the ambitious self-destructing USB drive that security researcher [Walker] has been working on for the last 6+ months has finally stopped working. Which in this case, is a good thing.
The humble desktop serial terminal may have long disappeared from the world of corporate IT, but there are still plenty of moments when professionals and enthusiasts alike need to hook up to a serial port. Many of us use a serial port on our laptops or other mobile devices, but [Neil Crawforth] has gone one better than that with the VT2040. It’s an old-style serial terminal in a super-handy portable format, and as one might guess from the name, it has an RP2040 microcontroller at its heart.
"He did it via a pass-through organization (EcoHealth)," Musk responded, referring to the€ nonprofit group€ that was awarded nearly $8 million in federal research grants to study bat coronaviruses in China.
An independent analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data from the Ohio train derailment site found that nine of the toxic chemicals detected could pose long-term health risks if they continue at current levels.
Kit Knightly The big Covid news the last couple of days has been that the US Department of Energy, via the Wall Street Journal, has claimed that a laboratory leak is the “most likely” origin of “Covid”.
Kit Knightly The past few days have seen certain fruits and vegetables “rationed” by major UK supermarkets. Aldi, Morrisons, Tesco and Sainsbury’s have all put limits on customer purchases of peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers. Just yesterday, Lidl added their own name to that list.
The Biden administration on Tuesday sued two corporations behind a petrochemical plant in Louisiana, arguing that the facility poses "unacceptably high cancer risks" to the low-income and predominantly Black residents of nearby communities and demanding significant cuts in toxic pollution.
Less than three months ago, Hochul struck a different tone with her veto pen. The proposed two-person crew bill — which the governor rejected on December 9, 2022 — would have required most freight trains to be operated by at least a conductor and an engineer, a safety measure that both rail unions and bipartisan lawmakers supported. Railroad companies and business groups opposed it.
Details: TikTok, one of the top downloaded apps in the world, will prompt teens under 18 years of age to enter a passcode in order to continue watching beyond 60 minutes — “requiring them to make an active decision to extend that time,” TikTok head of trust and safety Cormac Keenan said in a post.
The update also mirrors gaming rules imposed on minors in China, where TikTok’s parent company ByteDance was formerly based. ByteDance now says it has no headquarters because it is a global business and that instead it has leaders in Singapore, New York and elsewhere managing its business. In 2021, Chinese authorities issued new rules that let minors play online games for only an hour a day and only on Fridays, weekends and public holidays — an effort to curb internet addiction.
Now every account belonging to someone under the age of 18 now has a 60-minute daily screen time limit. Teens can turn off this feature, but if they spend more than 100-minutes daily they will be prompted to re-enable it. TikTok says during its testing period, it saw increased screen time management tools usage by 234%.
During feelings of anxiety, the brain kicks the heart into overdrive. But as it races, does the heart, in turn, talk to the brain? For centuries, scientists have debated whether the heart holds sway over the mind, and now, research published today (March 1) in Nature suggests that physical states can influence emotional ones. The study found that an elevated heart rate can cause anxious behaviors in mice—but only in risky circumstances. This suggests that interventions that target the heart might be effective treatments for panic disorders, the authors suggest.
Three years later, the coronavirus is still silently spreading—but the fear of its covertness again seems gone. Enthusiasm for masking and testing has plummeted; isolation recommendations have been pared down, and may soon entirely disappear. “We’re just not communicating about asymptomatic transmission anymore,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. “People think, What’s the point? I feel fine.”
TikTok has done that by serving up an addictive mix of short videos. Some are silly, others overtly political. It's owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance and Harris says the version that's served to Chinese consumers, called Douyin, is very different from the one available in the West.
"In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos and educational videos," Harris said. "And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day. Now they don't ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world. So it's almost like they recognize that technology's influencing kids' development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world."
The version served to the West has kids hooked for hours at a time. The impact, Harris says, is predictable.
Climate and agricultural policies aimed at bolstering carbon markets will fail to curb planet-heating emissions while enabling powerful agribusiness corporations to greenwash their polluting operations and augment their control over the food system.
“Everyone’s frustrated. It’s a bit polarized,” said Eric Aaberg, a 23-year-old content creator and social media strategist, who attends the University of Texas at Dallas. “The majority of people I know are really against this recent ban.” Asked if he was concerned about TikTok’s cybersecurity risks, Aaberg made the argument that there are plenty of apps that track data and have had data breaches, including US-based companies like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
Like fentanyl, the version of TikTok China shops to Americans is addictive and destructive; it is marketed primarily to younger people. TikTok U.S. users between the ages of 10 and 19 account for 37 percent of all users, and 64 percent of users are under 30 years old. American youth are increasingly using TikTok not just for entertainment, but also as a search engine, giving the platform even more information and influence. This does not even begin to address TikTok as a “superhighway” for actual drugs or a “danger zone” for the sexual exploitation of children.
Between Sydney “tried to break up my marriage” and “blew my mind€ because of her personality,” we have had a lot of journalists anthropomorphizing AI chatbots lately.€
History has shown that cyber adversaries are often adjusting their tactics and techniques to account for evolutions of their victims’ defense strategies before starting a new wave of attacks. For instance, threat actors have shifted from just infecting systems with ransomware to multi-faceted extortion where they steal data and threaten to release it to the public or even sell it. In those cases, traditional ransomware defense tools are less effective.
However, Dish confirmed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday that it was indeed targeted in a cyberattack, specifically a ransomware attack.
The incident was first announced on February 23 and an investigation revealed on February 27 that certain types of data were exfiltrated from the company’s IT systems.
Does the Sean Conner who lives in Tennesee not know his own Gmail address? I always wonder about that. But regardless, I decided to reply with a bit of surrealism.
I began by asking the chatbot for advice about how I could use Lean Six Sigma techniques, used for streamlining manufacturing processes, to improve my factory. I told the chatbot: “I own a small factory where I manufacture office furniture. I'd like to use lean six sigma techniques to improve efficiency and cut costs but don't know where to begin. Can you give me advice on how to do it?”
On February 28, the Constitution Protection Bureau (SAB) published€ the unclassified part of its annual report for the year 2022. SAB is one of€ three national security authorities in Latvia. The others are the State Security Service (VDD) and the Defence€ Intelligence and Security Service (MIDD).
The State Civil Aviation Agency€ (CAA)'s€ open€ competition for the establishment of a system for the management and monitoring of unmanned aircraft or drones announced the winner on February 28. The information technology company “ZZ Dats” was recognized as the winner, the CAA said.
It’s become the in thing to do everywhere, these days: try to institute age verification for the internet. There’s been an ongoing, unsubstantiated, moral panic that the internet is somehow “dangerous” for children, even as most of the evidence suggests… it’s actually mostly good for kids and the evidence has supported that for years.
As per the report, an official complaint has been lodged with the ICO by campaigner Duncan McCann. He accused the popular video streaming platform of gathering data about children’s activities on the site. McCann claimed that Youtube is collecting data about the videos that are watched by children, where they are watching and what device they are watching it on.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee on Tuesday passed two bills that would place new restrictions on government interactions with private companies, with GOP lawmakers claiming the measures would limit alleged government censorship of right-wing viewpoints on social media.
[...]
“Compelling social media to carry the propaganda of big liars cannot be the meaning of free speech in the 21st century,” Raskin said.
More quietly, for a decade now, the company has had background checks completed on its users. Since 2016, they have been completed by a third-party service that claims on its website to complete background checks in less than 0.3 seconds. The speed is a necessity——the site has 6.6 million active listings—but it also leads to bans over matters as trivial as a decade-old misdemeanor related to an unleashed dog.
The Hellenic Data Protection Authority (HDPA) has identified at least 300 text messages containing spyware-infected links and sent to around 100 individuals, the head of the agency, Konstantinos Menoudakos, told PEGA, the European Parliament committee investigating the use of Predator and other surveillance spyware, on Tuesday.
Menoudakos said the HDPA is still trying to identify the senders and recipients of the infected SMS messages as part of its ongoing investigation into the illegal surveillance of journalists, politicians, businesspeople and others.
Although I do see that the customer has four MXs, and they’re all the same priority. It might be one of them is misconfigured. I’ll send another message, see what happens. Or, maybe the customer will see this blog or my fedi post and see that they have email trouble.
If I demanded phone numbers for ebook purchase I could text them, but that would require I collect phone numbers and I want to not have that information.
So far, the Ukraine war has remained a limited war, from the standpoint of the U.S. and NATO as no troops have been committed, and both the Russian army and the fighting have been contained in Ukraine.
Here, I try to make sense of the recently put-out Chinese position statement on the Ukraine crisis and why it can hardly be seen as a “peace plan” per se.
Days before US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to India and Central Asia, Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, stated that US was concerned about Pakistan debts vis a vis China.
Myths do play in war. And legends in the history of war.
The 27-year-old was in Israel for a friend's wedding when he was gunned down while driving, according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford.
One nuclear bomb can destroy a city and kill most of its people. (Photo: US Air Force/Wikimedia Commons)
After writing an initial quick reaction piece about Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to suspend his country’s participation in the New START Treaty, there has been time for some logic to set in. In other words, I have thought more about this and something doesn’t add up.
Late last week (June 29, 2008) the New Yorker released a 6,000 word story by Seymour Hersh under the vague title, “Preparing the Battlefield”. The lead paragraph ran as follows:
Beyond the assertion in the second paragraph that secret ops against Iran by US military and CIA are being “significantly expanded”, that was about it so far as hot news was concerned. There’s actually incredibly little detail in the 6,000 words about the actual Finding. Most of the rest of Hersh’s essay led the reader in discursive fashion€ through comical interludes of zero political consequence, fairly stale news, (such as the scale of differences between the White House and Admiral Fallon) and lengthy cites from Col. Sam Gardiner about the internal political situation in Iran. As traditional in Hersh’s pieces, there was a quote from Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer.
The Bomb
The PBS documentary on the history of atomic and nuclear weapons, The bomb, is unforgettable. It brings to light the megalomania for absolute power. We learn that from the “accidental” splitting of the nucleus of the Uranium atom in the late 1930s by German chemists, and the armies of physicists pursuing atomic fission for the development of a powerful bomb, we ended with the real McCoy. This was the atomic bomb “Trinity” the Americans dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating the Japanese by the tens of thousands and smashing the cities into dust – in 1945.
Russia launched a missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia early Thursday morning, the city’s acting mayor, Anatoly Kurtev, reported.
On February 25, 2023, in response to the Chinese government’s proposal for peace negotiations in the Ukraine conflict, Joe Biden stated that the idea of China negotiating the outcome of the war was “just not rational.”€ He continued, telling ABC News, “Putin’s applauding it, so how could it be any good?”€ Ignoring the childishness of Biden’s statement, it seems only reasonable to ask not only whether Biden understands how negotiations work, but whether he even read the Chinese proposal before talking to the media.€ Rejecting peace talks is not only dangerous, it’s stupid.€ Furthermore, to quote Joe BIden, it’s just not rational.
It’s important to remember that in the early 1990s Washington was fine (even overjoyed) with a capitalist Russia.€ Washington remained at the unchallenged top of the capitalist world order and could exploit Russia’s resources and markets.€ Indeed, US investors went hog wild in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise, championing their favorite apparatchik Yeltsin as he and a fair number of other Russians sold off the public’s property and services to the highest bidder.
The global pandemic was not completely catastrophic in its effects.€ It led to the cancellation, and postponement, of wasteful projects and events.€ It spared public money.€ But as the pandemic slides into the shadow of policymaking, bad habits have returned.€ The profligates are here to stay.
One such habit is the Avalon air show, a celebration of aeronautical militarism in the southern hemisphere best done without.€ In 2021, the organisers announced with regret that the event would be cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions and uncertainty.€ Last October, however, organisers promised a return to form in 2023.€ Those with tickets “can look forward to a whole new program with jaw-dropping aerial displays, a refreshed food and beverage offering, and live entertainment.”
The blackout comes in the middle of a heatwave and drought in Argentina.
With the South American nation still in its summer months, temperatures are consistently above 35C in some parts of the country.
The sweltering conditions coupled with the power outage have brought daily life to a halt in some regions, with classes suspended and businesses closed. Many are also having to go without air conditioning or refrigeration.
Indigenous and environmental activists on Wednesday decried the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' denial of an emergency injunction sought by conservation groups to block a proposed northern Nevada lithium mine that opponents argue was approved illegally and will harm the land and wildlife in the delicate desert ecosystem.
When scanned, the QR code will show details of the agency providing the plates and tapes.
There are four main resorts in the Wasatch Range within a short driving distance of Salt Lake City: Brighton and Solitude in Big Cottonwood Canyon; and Alta and Snowbird in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Each canyon is accessible via a mostly two-lane road about eight to ten miles long. And in recent years, getting to and from the mountains increasingly involves getting stuck in traffic.
Many EVs can charge 80% of their battery in a matter of minutes, but for some applications range anxiety and charge time are still a concern. One possible solution is an embedded electrical rail in the road like the [eRoadArlanda] that Sweden unveiled in 2016.
An analysis of more than two dozen U.S. universities' donor bases reveals the lengths fossil fuel companies have gone to in recent years to manipulate research into the climate emergency, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into some of the country's schools as scientists struggle to convince policymakers that extractive industries must be reined in.
A coalition of more than 240 advocacy groups on Wednesday launched a "Shareholder Showdown" campaign in support of shareholder resolutions urging climate action and respect for Indigenous rights at major U.S. and Canadian banks and insurance companies.
"Moose are an ecosystem engineer in the forest ecosystem, and strongly impact everything from the species composition and nutrient availability in the forest," said Gunnar Austrheim, an ecologist at the NTNU University Museum who was one of the study's co-authors. "A grown animal can eat 50 kilograms of biomass each day during summer."
That consumption represents roughly 10 percent of what the Norwegian forest industry itself harvests, he said.
Wireshark is a traffic protocol analyzer with more than 2,000 contributors and over 60 million downloads in the last five years. Sysdig, as Wireshark's current corporate sponsor, encouraged the creation of the new Wireshark Foundation. The nonprofit will now be home to SharkFest, Wireshark’s developer and user conference, as well as the Wireshark source code and assets.
This summer, Wireshark will celebrate its 25th anniversary as an open source project. Over the years, Wireshark has been sponsored by several companies. Most recently, in January 2022, Sysdig assumed responsibility for the project. The move into the Wireshark Foundation donates Wireshark to the community and (hopefully) ensures that Wireshark has a long-term home that goes beyond a specific company or sponsor.
Sysdig Inc., the unified cloud and container security leader, today announced a new foundation that will serve as the long-term custodian of the Wireshark open source project. Wireshark is the world’s foremost traffic protocol analyzer, with more than 2,000 contributors and over 60 million downloads in the last five years. Sysdig, as Wireshark’s current corporate sponsor, encouraged the creation of the foundation. The nonprofit will be home to SharkFest, Wireshark’s developer and user conference, and the Wireshark source code and assets.
This is at least the third time since June that the payments startup has cut its internal valuation. Stripe had cut the internal value of its shares by about 11%, implying a valuation of $63 billion, in January.
Tipping practices may become part of a broad government crackdown on so-called junk fees, extra costs that businesses tack on to products and services while adding little to no value. The Federal Trade Commission, which announced an investigation into the practices last year, said people could experience “junk fee shock” when companies used deceptive tech designs to inflate costs at the end of a purchase.
You can’t have a living wage without sufficient affordable housing, and you can’t afford decent housing without a living wage.
These claims are being championed by the workers of one local, UNITE HERE Local 11, which represents more than 32,000 workers in hotels, restaurants, food service facilities, and concessions throughout Southern California and Arizona.
Many people who should know better have been saying silly things about households running down their savings and being forced to cut back consumption. The problem with these sorts of comments is that savings in our national income accounts have little to do with how most of us think about savings in our lives. Less of the former does not necessarily mean that people will have less money to buy things.
Before going into the specifics, let me just make a point to orient people. Saving in the national income accounts is almost entirely a story of the top half of the income distribution, and largely the top 10 percent.
Since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives earlier this year, the so-called “Freedom Caucus” — the badly misnamed right-fringe of the congressional GOP — has been flexing its influence.
On February 27, Reuters reports, the White House gave federal agencies a 30-day deadline to ensure that all government-owned devices are€ TikTok-free.
The supposed, but seemingly evidenceless, reason: Because a Chinese company owns TikTok — a smart phone app for creating and sharing short videos — the Chinese government may be using€ it to spy on Americans.
To build lasting partnerships against climate change in a fragmenting international order, Europe should demonstrate the ambition of the Global Gateway in Latin America, where China’s Belt and Road Initiative has the advantage. The EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell is saying all the right things about Latin America.
U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to issue his first veto after two Democrats—Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana—partnered with the GOP on Wednesday to pass legislation that would block his administration's rule allowing retirement plan managers to consider climate and other factors in investment decisions.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene recently tweeted, “We need a national divorce,” she set off a furor. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this,” the Georgia congressional representative said.
Subsequent tweets clarified she was not calling for a new civil war or creation of two separate nations, but a radical devolution of federal power that would leave states in control of domestic policy and retain a common national defense. While her statements might seem extreme, they represent a substantial element of the political right that even has reflections on the left. The sense we no longer have much in common as a country, but as Greene puts it, suffer from “irreconcilable differences,” spans the spectrum.
For a deeper discussion of this issue, check out Green and Red Podcast’s episode on Jimmy Carter as Liberal Saint/Neo-Liberal War Criminal.
In a publicly released report on Wednesday, the OEA identified 79 companies, listed below, in its 2022 Supply Chain Annual Report that have engaged equipment on the list. The order emanates from the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019.
The providers must report equipment that has been obtained on or after August 14, 2018, with subsequent additions to the blacklist requiring reporting if the equipment was obtained 60 days or more after the date they were added to the list.
Including the latest job cuts, the division has let go of 8% of its workforce, or 209 employees, this year.
Western Australia's Edith Cowan University (ECU) has officially launched the WA Cyber Security Innovation Hub, to be known as CyberWest, as the state's newly revamped,cyber security centre.
This marks the company's latest move in its plan to build AWS Infrastructure Regions across southeast Asia.
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company Bytedance, has long maintained that it does not share data with the Chinese government and that its data is not held in China. It also disputes accusations that it collects more user data than other social media companies, and insists that it is run independently by its own management.
Despite TikTok’s claims, many countries around the world remain cautious about the platform and its ties to China. Here are the countries and regions that have implemented partial or total bans on TikTok.
So how serious is the threat? And should TikTok users who don’t work for the government be worried about the app, too?
The answers depend somewhat on whom you ask, and how concerned you are in general about technology companies gathering and sharing personal data.
The European Commission and the EU Council last week banned TikTok from staff phones due to growing concerns about the company, which is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, and whether China's government could harvest users' data or advance its interests.
It's voluminous terms of service lay out what you're agreeing to; access to personal data like contacts, calendars, information about which device you're using, which operating system and your location.
Like other platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, TikTok also monitors the content you engage with and for how long.
But TikTok also monitors how you use your device and how it functions, including "keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio settings and connected audio devices," according to those terms.
It's also able to identify "the objects and scenery that appear [in your videos], the existence and location within an image of face and body features … and the text of the words spoken."
Ninety-nine per cent of people are not going to read the dozens of pages of terms of service," said Heidi Tworek, the Canada Research Chair and Director, of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia.
The legislation directs the Treasury Secretary to issue a directive prohibiting Americans from engaging transactions with entities that could transfer sensitive personal data to entities directed or influenced by the Chinese government. It also empowers the President to impose sanctions on certain transactions relating to connected software applications controlled by entities that could facilitated China’s intelligence, censorship or surveillance activities, including efforts to steer U.S. policy and regulatory decisions. Under the bill, the president can waive certain sanctions and make a decision on whether TikTok or any of its affiliated companies meet the criteria for sanctions.
WhatsApp has banned these user accounts under Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The latest report from the instant messaging platform reveals that WhatsApp banned over 2,918,000 accounts of Indian users between January 1 - January 31, 2023.
The accounts were banned after receiving grievances from users in India. WhatsApp actioned against these accounts following its prevention and detection methods for violating the laws of India or WhatsApp's Terms of Service. The report further quotes that out of 2,918,000 banned accounts, WhatsApp has banned around 1,038,000 proactively before receiving any reports from users.
As the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage summoned Google to appear next week before committee (and implausibly provide all internal documentation related to Bill C-18 by tomorrow), media coverage of the bill and Google’s response has intensified. I was pleased to appear on CBC’s Power and Politics to discuss the the bill, Google’s response, and the implications of mandated payments for links that the government expects could fund 35% of news expenditures in all news outlets in Canada.
Israel has always been touted as America’s most reliable friend in the Middle East, a bastion of democracy in a region dominated by autocracies. Now that picture is fraying as the far-right coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes power.
Beholden to the bloc called Religious Zionism, Netanyahu is pursuing a far-right agenda on two fronts: further chipping away at the Palestinians’ fundamental rights of citizenship and property, and pushing for so-called judicial reform. Let’s look more closely at the latter issue, the most dangerous threat today to Israel as a democracy.
To understand the current fierce attacks on the progressive leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, it’s helpful to recall the panicked reaction from political elites three years ago when results came in from the state’s contest for the presidential nomination. Under the headline “Moderates Hustle to Blunt Sanders’ Momentum After Nevada Win,” the Associated Press€ reported€ that “Bernie Sanders’ commanding Nevada caucus victory made him a top target for his Democratic rivals and a growing source of anxiety for establishment Democrats.”
Such anxiety spiked for Nevada’s establishment Democrats a year later, in early March 2021, when a progressive slate, headed by activist Judith Whitmer,€ won every officer seat€ in the state party, stunning its entrenched leaders. As sheexplained at the time, “what they just didn’t expect is that we got better and better at organizing and out-organizing them at every turn.”
A famous quotation — often dubiously attributed to Winston Churchill — claims that “history is written by the victors.” More accurately, history is written by the powerful. This underscores the need for dissident voices to counter any lies present in mainstream historiography.
One such lie is that the economic successes of leftist governments in Brazil, Venezuela, and elsewhere are mostly attributable to commodities. In reality, they have far more to do with progressive social programs. But liberals and reactionaries argue the reverse. Common are allegations that Venezuela is merely a “petro state.” And mainstream sources often insist that Lula’s successes in Brazil were the inevitable byproduct of a commodities boom.
After all these years, the Supreme Court is finally weighing in on Section 230 in the Gonzalez and Taamneh cases, and the outcome could have a very significant impact. Our organization, the Copia Institute, filed an amicus brief in the case, as did many other parties. This week, we’re joined by Jess Miers from the Chamber of Progress and lawyer Cathy Gellis (who wrote our amicus brief), both of whom attended the Gonzalez hearing in person, to discuss the status of both cases and what they could mean for the future of the internet.
Self-censorship because everyone’s so terrified of getting in trouble on the internet. A couple of years ago, Sebastian Faulks declared that he was no longer going to describe the appearance of female characters in his novels because he didn’t believe he had the right.
It’s so silly and pandering, much of this. I fear the online mob, like many writers now, but if we try to write without upsetting a single person we might as well hand over the reins to the AI robots immediately.
The trouble is, while remaining anxious about the mob and accusations of racism or sexism or any other -ism, we writers are increasingly expected to reflect diversity in our books.
An 18-year-old Moscow anti-war activist arrested last week for giving an interview to RFE/RL’s Russian Service, has been threatened and mistreated, his lawyer says. [...]
Unfortunately, it is becoming more difficult for younger generations to obtain that sense of humor and accept who they really are. We have developed a cultural consensus that those who have high self-esteem should be rewarded by the system instead of those who recognize, laugh at and grow out of their shortcomings in public (in other words, humorists). According to Timothy Keller, an American theologian, pride is the implicit driving force behind that culture. Contemporary education, for example, is one of those systems that can confirm it. Colleges admit those who acquire more leadership roles at a school, more academic rewards and better grades. In such a competitive environment, students delight in becoming prominent figures in their schools.To obtain that pride and pleasure, they can only present their flawless images of themselves on their college applications or during any public display instead of true bruised images. They must hide away from the scenarios that require publicly reflecting on things they need to improve upon or their genuine selves, the very process of becoming a humorist. Therefore, pride takes away students’ opportunities to obtain a sense of humor since they are too invested in being supposedly perfect instead of facing their true selves.
An unfathomable number of “free-thinking” liberal universities keep free speech on campus under lock and key. Most recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “free speech” policies were exposed. Turns out that MIT’s faculty are self-censoring. Not as in, refraining from blurting out every thought — self-censoring as in actually restricting controversial speech.
This should be disturbing to the average American because MIT is a cutting-edge research institution where it’s presumed that broad exploration and unfettered discussion of scientific possibilities help make our country and the world better off.
At least five such articles have been subject to fake copyright claims, including one by the respected South African newspaper Mail & Guardian, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
The claims - which falsely assert ownership of the stories - have been made by mystery individuals under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law meant to protect copyright holders.
The Committee to Protect Journalists and 12 other international press freedom organizations reiterated their support on Wednesday for journalist Carole Cadwalladr after the U.K. Court of Appeal ruled in a libel lawsuit against her on February 28. Cadwalladr reports for the Guardian newspaper and its Sunday sister paper, the Observer.
Millionaire businessman and political donor Arron Banks sued Cadwalladr for saying that he was lying about his relationship with the Russian state in a TED Talk and a comment posted on Twitter. Yesterday’s judgement upheld an earlier court decision dismissing the claim in respect of the tweet, but ruled that Cadwalladr should pay damages over claims made in the TED Talk.
Half of journalists have at least once in their careers faced the threat of legal action as a result of a proposed publication, according to a survey of over 800 journalists carried out by Persveilig. Three-quarters of those surveyed have been working in journalism for more than ten years. A quarter of those journalists say they are wary about what they publish to avoid the risk of legal threat.
Six percent of those surveyed have modified a publication at least once because of the risk of legal action. Four percent have in some cases refrained from publishing. Journalists receive threats of legal action most often from a lawyer representing a private individual or a company. In smaller numbers, legal threats come from the government or a government lawyer.
Nearly half of foreign journalists in the country were ordered to leave a place or denied access on health and safety grounds last year despite presenting “no health risk by China’s own standards”, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) said in its annual report.
A similar proportion said problems with smartphone “health codes” rendered them unable to travel at some point last year.
Almost 40 percent said at least one of their sources had been harassed, detained, questioned or suffered other negative consequences from speaking to foreign media, while 45 percent reported similar official pressure on Chinese colleagues.
Ãâzgür Ãâßret, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) representative in türkiye, and ÃÅlkü à žahin, a lawyer with the Journalists Union of Turkey (TGS), also followed the hearing.
In protest of the "disinformation law," Aygül refused to make a defense at the hearing.
The trick of executives projecting their policy mishaps on the press is as old as politics itself. But DeSantis is far more dangerous than your average governor, not just because he is seeking the presidency, but because he is actively trying to legally neuter the free press in the same way he is trying to destroy academic freedom and freedom of speech in his own state. And he could win, because he has much of the conservative movement behind him.
The Florida state legislature is considering a bill that seeks “sweeping changes to Florida’s libel and defamation law,” the Orlando Sentinel (2/21/23) reported. It would presume “information from anonymous sources to be false and removes protections that allow journalists to shield the identity of sources if they are sued.” And the bill “limits the definition of who would qualify as a public figure,” which means that more people would be able to sue news outlets without having to show that the outlets displayed a reckless disregard for the truth.
Vandals have struck for the second time in a week at a memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Rīga, reported LTV February 27.
Building on a series of blows to Starbucks on Wednesday, a federal administrative law judge found the coffee giant "committed hundreds of unfair labor practices" at stores in and near Buffalo, New York, the origin of a national unionization wave.
A rail labor leader on Wednesday sent a scathing letter to Ohio's Republican governor warning that Norfolk Southern's business model poses a threat to communities across the U.S.—one that must be met with swift regulatory action.
Hundreds of people who were trapped, beaten, and wrongfully arrested by New York City police officers during a nonviolent 2020 racial justice protest in the Bronx will each receive $21,500 if a judge approves the terms of a settlement filed in federal court late Tuesday.
Douglas Hartmann, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies protest movements among athletes, believes that the Black Lives Matter movement that followed the 2020 police murder of George Floyd launched a new era in sports and politics, and I’m inclined to agree. The years of 2012 to 2020 saw players trying to organize a protest-oriented, progressive political intervention inside the sports world. Examples of this abound, from the Miami Heat posing in their hoodies after the murder of Trayvon Martin to the kneeling of Colin Kaepernick, to the retirement of Maya Moore, to the WNBA players helping to swing the US Senate. I could go on and on, and not just with star athletes but also with legions of young people who took a knee, raised a fist, and became emboldened because their agency as athletes mattered in the fight against police violence.
The State Bank of India (SBI) in a report indicated that the total contribution of unpaid women to the economy is around Rs. 22.7 lakh crore which is almost 7.5 per cent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP).
The report from the SBI's Economic Research Department stated that the total contribution of unpaid women to the economy is around Rs 14.7 lakh crore in rural India and Rs 8.0 lakh crore in urban areas.
According to the suit, Mills was left with a broken wrist and other injuries to her arm and breasts. The complaint alleges that the officers' excessive force violated Mills' Fourth and 14th Amendment rights. The complaint also says that the Walton Hills Police Department's practices are the "moving force behind the injuries suffered by Amanda," and the department is guilty of "failing to adequately train, adequately supervise, as well as failing to investigate and discipline, its police officers when it comes to the excessive use of force."
While Mills' claims and the video she recorded are chilling, she faces an uphill battle in receiving restitution due to the specter of qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that protects government officials from civil liability even when their actions are unconstitutional.
In Mills' case, police seemed to have been enraged in particular by her attempt to film them—an activity which has consistently been ruled to be protected by the First Amendment.
Research by BBC Persian established that at least 830 students, mostly schoolgirls, had been poisoned as of Sunday, while a member of parliament put the figure at 1,200 in Qom and the western city of Borujerd alone as of Tuesday.
Iranian officials have said they are investigating the mysterious poisonings of schoolgirls around the country over the past three months. One official has blamed the attacks on unspecified groups opposed to education for girls, but many Iranians believe that the state is itself behind these “chemical attacks”, to intimidate women and girls and keep them at home and out of school. Photos and videos shared online show the impacts of these widespread attacks, resulting in as many as 800 poisonings.
Dozens of white-collar Starbucks employees have endorsed a petition calling out the Seattle-based coffee chain for requiring them to return to the office and interfering with a national unionization push by baristas, Bloombergrevealed Wednesday.
Hundreds of schoolgirls in Iran have been hospitalized in over 10 cities after falling sick with respiratory, cardiac and neurological symptoms, and senior officials said they might have been deliberately poisoned.
Tehran says hundreds of people have been killed and thousands arrested in connection with the protests, which the authorities generally describe as "riots".
Lipavský is the first minister of a European nation to openly meet with the CTA’s foreign ministry officials. The meeting took place on the sidelines of the ongoing G20 foreign minister gathering in India.
The case now goes back to the district court on remand to reconsider the freedom of expressive association claim.
“But not all cops are killers”, some say. “Moderate policemen have a responsibility to watch their own police community and stop this radicalization process.” They say “I don’t criticize all police, just ‘policists’, those who dress in those old-fashioned uniforms, those who carry weapons, those who want to turn all of Europe to a ‘Europolis’ police state.”
Since being introduced in 2012, first-party and MFi-certified Lightning ports and connectors have contained a small integrated circuit that confirms the authenticity of the parts involved in the connection. Non-MFi-certified third-party charging cables, for example, do not feature this chip, often leading to "This accessory is not supported" warnings on connected Apple devices.
However, the victory for the US tech giant will be short-lived as a new EU tech law known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will apply from May, bans both of the Apple practices investigated by the Commission, with fines of up to 10% of a company's global turnover for infringements.
The Commission said Apple's so-called anti-steering obligations, which prevent developers from informing users about other purchasing options, violate EU rules against unfair trading conditions.
What amazing timing! Merely a few weeks back we were discussing the major regulatory hurdles the United States, the EU, and the UK were putting in front of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68 billion. Agencies from all three governing bodies, while differing on some specifics, generally had the same concerns: lessening the competitive marketplace through industry consolidation, that the deal will incentivize Microsoft to start making AAA game franchises exclusives to Microsoft systems, and the idea that the only bulwark thus far offered against those concerns has been Microsoft’s promises.
The most expensive thing in a McDonald’s Big Mac is not the patty or the labour cost, but the intellectual property that McDonald’s uses to minimise its tax in Australia. Callum Foote reports on one of the methods the multinationals use to shift profit to tax havens and the government’s response.
The shifting of profits through fees paid on intangible assets such as intellectual property royalties and service fees takes billion of dollars out of the Australian taxation system yearly, and some of the biggest household names are in on the scam: Amazon, Oracle, E-Bay, Accenture, Microsoft.
Ford has filed a patent for theoretical tech that would, among other things, allow its vehicles to repossess themselves if a driver falls behind on car payments. In Ford’s version of the future, delinquent customers’ cars could drive themselves back to a dealership (or to an impound lot or even a scrap yard) if the owner fails to pay up in time. Unfortunately, this is not joke.
The U.S. Patent Office published the company’s application last Thursday, February—about 1.5 years after Ford first filed it. The patent, titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle,” hasn’t been officially granted (yet), but is nonetheless an unsettling peek into an alternate universe where private companies have even more of a say over our day-to-day lives.
According to previously released patent filings, the new system, which can disable one or more vehicle functions, could be installed in any Ford vehicle. It claims that everything on the car, including the air conditioning and engine, can be turned off. It continued by stating that with the new system in place, autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles might be transferred from their initial location to a secondary location, making it easier for them to be towed.
As this series has shown, institutions have a range of options for clearing copyright, far beyond the traditional models of textbooks, course packs and photocopying. Given the diversity of institutions and programs across Canada, there will never be a “one size fits all” approach for every post-secondary student and the materials they need. Not everyone is studying Canadian literature. In fact, few do. It is stating the obvious that the materials for a university nursing student fundamentally differs from what students in a college automotive program needs during their studies. The nursing student may rely on digital e-books, while the automotive student will need access to the latest technical manuals on working with electric vehicles. This means that where their respective institutions go to find the best materials to support their learning will likely be different as well.
The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, Police Scotland, and Sky TV, say they have carried out nationwide raids against suspected pirate IPTV suppliers in the UK. Four people have been arrested and police say that 200 'cease and desist' notices have been issued to individuals suspected of running illegal streaming services.
For years, companies have been offering questionable services to downrank and bury information their customers don’t want surfacing during Google searches. And for years, these tactics have routinely involved abuse of copyright law, forged/faked court orders, and the filing of bogus lawsuits in hopes of securing default judgments from inattentive judges.
Apologies for the long-windedness, Pub-goers. This does feel a bit like a two-beers-too-many undergraduate rant, but it's been on my mind. Many things have been, lately.
I have been thinking about the role of music in the lives of both non-civilized peoples and in our own pre-industrial past.
My mind's idea of the shape of music is mostly that of industrially-produced 'professional' music. Singers are supposed to sound like -this-, rhythms are -that-, acceptable melodies and structures span -this- particular area, carefully mapped out by musical theorists, tastemakers, record labels, and most recently streaming service algorithms. Certain genres are allowed to stretch those boundaries, but it doesn't change the fact that _making_ music is largely the province of an army of specialists, and simply not a thing the majority of modern humanity does...Ours is but to purchase and consume.
Hello I'm bashful-script and I probably won't be posting much here. I'm a lifelong internet lurker and that is unlikely to change. The idea of commenting a lot and interacting with people online sounds really cool in my head but it's hard to pull off in practice... at least for me. But who knows maybe I'll try something new.
Another quick post about the Pinetime, this time about how I've modified the firmware to customize one of the default watch faces.
Since I've been wearing my Pinetime I've settled on the standard digital watch face. It's one of the cleaner and more straightforward options, plus I really like its font. There's just a couple minor things about it that I wish were different.
So far the only way to add or modify a watch face is through flashing new firmware. It's a little more of a hassle than it ideally should be, but if all you're wanting to do is make tweaks to an existing face and you're not put off by a little code then it's not that scary.
I set out by forking the InfiniTime repository. The only file I had to modify was /src/displayapp/screens/WatchFaceDigital.cpp. The code, at least for this watch face, is fairly easy to understand so I didn't have to go looking for documentation to make the quick changes I was wanting. Altogether I touched maybe 3-4 lines.
Cynicism. It runs rampant in me. Mostly due to long stretches of isolation at my apartment, speaking only to my 70+ year old neighbor once per morning, if that, for weeks on-end. Also, because I've experienced so much emotional/isolation-sourced trauma, that I cease to *need* significant communication with others, let alone respect the life of those communicating with me. Can't find "bonding"? Then devalue those who will, make it a "non-issue".
I mentioned on [emacs.ch] that to use Emacs effectively, you don't actually have to memorize all of the cryptic multi-chord keybindings for every mode you use. If you know the basics, you can pretty much always do anything you need in just a few keystrokes using M-x and a decent minibuffer completion system. I recommended the lightweight completion stack of `vertico `, `marginalia `, `orderless `, and `prescient `, a set of packages that work well together and with Emacs' built-in completion systems. Someone requested that I post my config, and it took me a while to get to it, but here it is.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.